Tense in LFG : Syntax and Morphology

Abstract

An important tenet of LFG is the lexical integrity principle which s a ys that the leaves of c{ structure trees are complete surface words. Given this principle, the morphological component is seen as distinct from the syntax. It can be modelled by sublexical rules as we will illustrate below but the principles that apply to these rules are di erent from those applying in the syntax (see Bresnan and Mchombo (1995) for discussion). The way L F G is set up allows single words and phrases to contribute the same or similar information to an f{structure. For example a form like parla, pass e simple of parler, contributes information similar to that contributed by a p arl e, t h e p a s s e compos e of the same verb. The framework allows a similar treatment f o r the two forms as we l l a s t h e m a i n tenance of lexical integrity a n d m a k es it possible to avoid word formation rules in the syntax without losing paradigmatic transparency (see Vincent a n d B orjars (1996) for discussion). These possibilities, however, are not always exploited as well as they could be, and using them transparently is made less easy than it could be by another architectural feature of LFG. The distinction that the architecture of LFG m a k es between c{structure and f{structure was meant t o e m body the insight t h a t w ord order and other constituent structure di erences are not necessarily indicative of profound syntactic di erences among languages. LFG follows here the distinction made e.g. in Keenan (1976) between coding properties and genuine syntactic characteristics. The f{structure allows us to abstract away from super cial word order di erences to bring out the more fundamental syntactic similarities (or di erences) among languages. This abstracting away from certain di erences is theoretically important but also practically, e.g. in the context of translation. It makes the f{structure into a structure that comes close to the underspeci ed representation used in the Core Language Engine (see Genabith and Crouch (1996) (Alshawi (1992), Alshawi and Crouch (1992)), which can be argued to be, from a practical point of view, a good candidate for input and output of transfer rules (see Dorna et al. (1998)). But the traditional architecture gets us only half way: while it abstracts away from c{structure phenomena, it encodes all the morphological information in the f{structure. This information, however, is to a large extent a s m uch encoding information as word order is. 1 We w ould like to thank the following people for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article: John Maxwell, who proposed a similar architecture in conversations with the second author, Ron Kaplan, Miriam Butt, Fr ed erique Segond and Veronika K n uppel. In particular we thank Joan Bresnan for extensive c o m m e n ts and suggestions. The issues she raised could not be discussed in su cient detail in this short contribution. Needless to say that the commentators do not necessarily share the perspective w e are taking here. Special thanks go also to M...

Syntax as an exponent of morphological features

“…grammatical formalisms, we show that the interpenetration of syntax and morphology exhibited by the Latin data is more difficult to accommodate within these lexicalist theories than is assumed by Börjars et al (1997). We find empirical support for a distinction between purely formal or morphological features and contentive syntactic features, a distinction which is missing from the standard model of LFG but which is made (under a variety of different architectural assumptions) in some recent LFG work (including Butt, Niño & Segondo, 1996, Frank and Zaenen, 1998, Sadler 1999.…”

“…Morphological theory has devoted very little attention to the way in which a wordand-paradigm morphology might interface with syntactic representations. Similarly, since the morphology is a discrete component responsible for the lexicon (the collection of basic and derived word forms), lexicalist syntactic theories have by and large paid scant attention to it and worked on the simple assumption that it will deliver the appropriate syntactic primitives (Frank and Zaenen, 1998, is an important exception).…”

“…Although f-structure in the classical model (Kaplan and Bresnan 1982) largely abstracted away from information proper to c-structure, such as categorial features ([±N,±V] or their equivalent), it did contain a significant residue of morphosyntactic 'contamination' (see Frank and Zaenen, 1998 for further discussion of this point).…”

“…The direction of much recent work, then, is to recognise the anomalous nature of such morphologically-motivated features in f-structure and move then into a different projection or dimension of linguistic representation. Manning, 1999 andFrank andZaenen, 1998 propose interesting architectural innovations within LFG, but our analysis is essentially independent of the precise choice of architecture.…”

“…

We examine the periphrastic passive construction in Latin, in which a part of the verb paradigm is expressed by an auxiliary/copular verb 'to be' with the perfective passive participle, with the syntax of a predicative adjective construction. Building in part on the treatment sketched by Börjars, Vincent and Chapman (1997) and other recent work in Lexical Functional Grammar (Frank and Zaenen, 1998) and related

…”